Right on...thanks for the response. I'm now wondering if I'm doing the wrong thing by maintaining a boot partition. Or if it's a platform specific issue. Or, if it doesn't matter at all... Need a guru to lay down the law.

Thanks for the info - I definitely am not in a position to disagree! I'm trying to establish the best system setup that I can. I will definitely try a setup without a boot partition. I'm just bummed that I spent the weekend setting my current system up with a boot partition. Because after all...isn't the whole idea behind the Gentoo distro optimization and efficiency?